(I'd like to go on the record as saying that I bought the Fear & Hunger games before the video essayists got to it.)

It's oft said as a maxim, "To steal from one is plagiarism, to steal from many is research". A common thread amongst many retro throwback indie games you see come out is a slavish devotion to a single game, or some dubious rose-tinted era that never really existed. Indie devs who's only real creative aspirations are "What if I made Chrono Trigger again?". Fear & Hunger 2: Termina at a glance could easily be thrown under this umbrella as well: it's plot is a whole-sale reference to Majora's Mask (if you couldn't already tell from the title alone). There's an enemy in-game that's just Art the Clown from Terrifier. Silent Hill, old internet urban legends, H. P. Lovecraft, Hellraiser, the list goes on and on. Termina could easily be filed under this umbrella of unfocused & derivative pop-culture worshipping games, but despite being outwardly familiar, Termina's greatest strength is it's sense of mystique and magic; it's ability to feel like a truly unknowable black box of psychosexual Eurojank horror.

Termina uses its myriad base of familiar inspirations and influences as a jumping-off point, a way to set your expectations before it pulls the wool over your eyes and shows you what it truly wants to accomplish. With a cast of 14 unique characters (8 of which are playable, each with unique ways they affect the core gameplay loop) and a 3 day time limit, there's a sense of wonder as you try (and die) again over and over, with each playable character & NPC having some kind of obscure interaction with other characters or the world that you can stumble upon multiple hours into your 5th or 6th playthrough still. It's structure of a large and relatively static world map, coupled with a downright sadistic and unfair difficulty almost lends Termina the air of a masocore game a la I Want to Be the Guy or Kaizo Mario. It's about venturing head-first into a challenge and getting your ass handed to you in a way so insane and out of left-field you almost laugh at the sheer absurdity of it if you weren't so pissed about your last save being an hour and a half ago.

Saving your game at a bed advances time and causes characters to move around, potentially die, and limit your ability to explore, yet is also the only reliable way to access the game's leveling mechanic to improve your character. Powerful enemies can randomly show up around town and deliver total party wipeouts. While enemy positions and item boxes are static in each playthrough, their appearances and contents are otherwise completely random and up to chance. This risk and reward throughline forces a different approach each playthrough with enough variety that it always feels like you're never truly in control of the situation, no matter how many shotgun shells your carrying around or how many people you have in your party, and it manages to keep up the incredibly tense horror even after you've been desensitized to the horrific monster designs & nightmare scenarios with the constant looming threat of losing progress.

Termina is a dubiously tactful psychosexual nightmare of a game that I can't get enough of. While it will no doubt be picked apart down to its very cogs in the future, I'm enamored by it's mystical black box nature and I hope the future updates this game is planned to recieve flesh it out even more. I can say with confidence that Termina is a cult classic in the making, and a bold new entry into the RPG Maker Horror canon.

The friends of Ringo Ishikawa was a game that took me back to my teenage years, viewed through the sobering & cynical lens of hindsight. The titular Ringo & his friends are a bunch of classic Japanese delinquents, with seemingly no initial higher ambitions beyond their schoolyard gang warfare, entering their final year as students with graduation on the horizon. Despite being a gaggle of petty thugs who smoke cigarettes & have seemingly little interest in their own futures, it's shown as the plot goes on that there's more to each of these delinquents than let's on. Your violent, dumb-as-rocks lackey Goro is a surprisingly talented thespian. Your number one brawler Ken has the talent necessary for a shot at a boxing career in college. Even Ringo himself is a shockingly erudite scholar with an interest in literature, a once-promising career in karate, and is a surprisingly idealistic, loyal, man of virtue. The one thing holding them back is their gang lifestyle & ideas, something that resonated with me as someone who saw this same situation play out dozens of times in my youth.

My own high school wasn't great looking back on it. Violence & abuse were common occurrences, drug use & sex in the hallways was an unspoken fact of life, and basically everyone was a minority of some kind from a low-income background. Lots of people I knew came from broken homes, or were working part-time to put food on the table, or were otherwise struggling with something no kid should've been dealing with at that age, the kind of things that can make studying for your history exam seem like small potatoes. It's a structural issue decades in the making that leads to people getting trapped in places like these, and unfortunately not everyone is able to escape it. Schoolyard fights that escalated into shootings. Football players who graduate with bright prospects only to then get arrested for murder. Kids akin to Ringo's gang members like Masaru or Goro, who have zero sights beyond the now & fully believe they'll be set for a life of petty crime after graduation. The short-sighted violent mindsets people box themselves into that end up spelling their own ends because they can't escape the circumstances that put them there.

I vividly remember hanging out in the parking lot after school one day, and I saw a kid reading a book on the hood of his car. His friends came up to him and immediately dogged on him for this and the supposed weakness such a hobby would project on your image, and he sheepishly put it away in his bag before he left with his friends. It's a small event in hindsight, but it was called back to my mind crystal clear during a scene where Ringo's friends rip into their fellow member Goro for his new vested interest in acting.

Ringo, for all his virtues, for all the books you can make him read, for all the training he can undergo, for all the studying & knowledge you can try to impart on him, still fully believes that his gang of schoolyard bullies is going to last forever, despite it being made rapidly apparent that everyone is starting to move on and find their own callings. Ringo still gets into casual street fights & latches onto his childish notions of schoolyard ethics, of "official challenges" and "rules," even as things spiral out of anyone's control & everyone starts to get in too deep. Much like some of my peers that I saw in my youth, he's a bright soul with potential and promise that is being squandered by his own adherence to violence and unhealthy group mentalities & expectations, and the simple fact is that as the days go by, everyone around him is starting to realize that they need to grow up and move past it all.

Everyone except him.

"Listen up, Phones! The world ends with you. If you want to enjoy life, expand your world. You gotta push your horizons out as far as they'll go."

To truly understand another person is a fundamentally impossible task. No matter how much we can claim to know about other people, we will never be able to truly know everything about a person. And yet, despite the apparent Sisyphean nature of reaching out to people, to remain alone is to deny yourself the true scope of the human experience. To give up on others is to give up on yourself, and consequently, the world as a whole. Despite how much it can hurt to lay your heart bare to other people, we're in this shit together, ain't we? It's only through taking the risk to open up that we can expand our world beyond the boundaries of ourselves, and what better way to represent the difficulty of learning to open up to and understand people than with the most action-per-minute ADHD-ass battle system to grace RPGs?

The World Ends With You is a master-class of the mostly now-extinct maximalist game design philosophy that pervaded the 7th generation of gaming, being a game that makes full use of every single aspect of the DS' unique hardware. Control two characters at once in combat, one with the d-pad/face buttons, another with the touch screen. Match cards, do arithmetic & deal poker hands on the top screen while you tap, touch, swipe, scratch, even scream to attack and cast spells on the bottom screen. It's so gripping and unique that it's virtually impossible to emulate the sheer frenetic energy of the gameplay (which is why, to my knowledge, future ports don't even try to replicate it); a true dedication to hardware & design that makes the unfortunate stranding of this game on the DS almost impressive in it's sheer audacity & commitment to putting every single bit of hardware to use. In picking up TWEWY to idly pass the time during my 40 minute bus commutes to my college campus, I had unknowingly gotten myself sucked into one of the most innovative action RPGs to grace the system.

This frenetic & captivating gameplay is complimented perfectly by TWEWY's period-perfect commitment to the late 2000's urban youth's sense of charm & style. Fighting to a playlist of dozens of unique J-Pop/J-Rock/J-Rap battle themes; hitting the town to buy high-rise skinny jeans, browsing goth fashion boutiques for Scene Kid arm-warmers and knee-high boots to craft a fashion-disaster of a character build; keeping a pulse on the modern trends of the youth culture epicenter that is the Shibuya scramble crossing to maximize your damage output. The under & over-current of youth culture, fashion trends & artistry runs strong through TWEWY's veins, in every aspect of its UI & gameplay systems.

In fitting with this focus on youth culture, the story tackles the most pressing personal issue of every generation before, during and after ours: opening up to others. TWEWY's protagonist Neku is a thorny individual who is initially down-right unlikable, uncooperative & borderline malicious in his actions towards his partner & those just trying to help him survive. Put as on-the-nose as possible, his world starts & ends with him, and no one else. But by being forced into the Reaper's life-or-death game, attached by the hip to a wide variety of party members & crazy characters, he's forced to rehabilitate his misanthropic worldview & opinions of other people, and by the end of his adventure, he's dedicated himself to his friends & mankind as a whole. Understanding other people is a difficult & terrifying prospect, but it's only by clashing with others and their values & beliefs, and by making an attempt to help & know those around us that we truly live. The world doesn't just end with you, it begins with you, and it's horizons stretch as far as you are willing to push them. TWEWY is a game that leaves you with a single thought after it's all over:

It's a wonderful world, isn't it?

Recommended by XenonNV as part of this list.

Partway through OMORI it dawned on me that there's a timeline where this game managed to release when I was in high school and I would've 100% made it a core facet of my personality for years.

OMORI is more likely than not the game that comes to everyone's mind when they think of the quintessential "Quirky Depression Earthbirth RPG", the hypothetical dead horse that encapsulates a lot of people's gripes with the modern indie scene and all it's eccentricities, and, to concede to that stereotyped image somewhat, it's for the most part true. OMORI is part lighthearted and surreal RPG about the titular main character and his adventures in the wonderfully quirky dream world of Headspace, and part mental health story about Omori's real-life counterpart Sunny and his struggles in the mundane reality of Faraway Town with his own mental health and relationships. The primary issue with OMORI however is not really with it's oft-maligned aesthetic or subject matter, but rather the fact that it's a complete tonal mess.

Headspace, as a dream world inside of Sunny's head, is obviously allowed to be a little surreal, as it's where most of the game's Earthbound DNA is apparent, from it's cutesy enemies to it's fun cast of eccentric NPCs and elevated sense of reality where anything goes. It's where 90% of OMORI takes place and is, for the most part, incredibly charming and fun. The tonal issues start to become apparent though when the Headspace sections lead into the Faraway Town segments, where, despite supposedly taking place in reality, still have a little too much whimsy and Earthbound-esque atmosphere. There's still wacky NPCs to talk to and goofy part-time jobs to have, which, while still enjoyable, isn't enough of a contrast to Headspace and doesn't mesh well with the relatively grounded and serious interpersonal drama between the core cast that revolves around grief and loss. It results in OMORI feeling like two disparate Quirky Earthbound-likes being duct-taped together without any real cohesiveness between the two halves, and only causes more issues down the line when the plot in Faraway town starts to actually go somewhere.

Headspace initially starts off as a low-stakes kid's adventure, which is perfectly fine for the Prologue, where it uses that initial impression to disarm the player when they first enter Faraway Town in the real world, but as is soon made apparent, Headspace is pure fluff, a complete nothing-burger that only really serves to pad out the runtime. Compared to the snappy pace and relative brevity of Faraway Town, Headspace tends to drag on for hours at a time with absolutely jack-shit happening, both literally and thematically. The various sprite animations, fancy textbox effects and UI is very charming and appealing at first, but the frequent use of them & their annoying length results in a start-and-stop gameplay flow that delights in wasting your time, and it's an issue that only gets worse as the game goes on, where long stretches of overly-goofy filler plot happen without anything substantive to bite into, that do nothing but pad out the runtime so the game can hit an arbitrary length quota. In addition to this, the idea of Headspace reflecting Sunny's inner thoughts is frankly underutilized, when that connection to the main character's subconscious could've been used to give the lengthy Headspace segments some more weighty thematic story relevance beyond simple visual callbacks to Faraway Town.

Despite the long stretches of nothing filler that feel like having a sugar crash, when OMORI wants to get serious, it can actually deliver more often than not. The subtle underlying horror of Headspace is pretty effective when it wants to be, and the drama of Faraway Town, while coming across like an afterschool PSA more often than not, is actually quite engaging and emotionally competent, but because OMORI is trying to maintain it's pastel Sanrio Lo-Fi Kawaii Future Bass Tumblr aesthetic at all times, this results in even the serious moments lacking punch because of the fact it's edges have been sanded down as smooth as possible for the sake of palatability. This is made most apparent with it's final plot twist at the very end of the game, which, without going into spoilers, is an insanely dark and out-of-left-field bout of tonal whiplash that is not only a massive misstep in the solid framework of the game's plot up until then, but is scrapping against the game's Instagram Self-Care™ Awareness Post-ass final message of overcoming depression and self-doubt by not being afraid to rely on your friends for help. It's way too big of an elephant to ignore and not something you can just drop in the player's lap and treat with the same levity with which the more mundane mental health struggles are in the plot. It's the most frustrating aspect of OMORI by far because I can see how it could work! It's not even presented badly in-game (in fact, the reveal is one of my favorite moment of the game bar none), but it's consistent adherence to the vibe initially established by Headspace ends up dragging what should be a master-class twist down hard.

OMORI is a frustrating, mixed bag of a game I want to like more than I do. It's playing all the right notes, and even manages to tug at my worn-out heartstrings with a surprising frequency, and I can see the appeal behind it; how it's managed to gather such a devoted fanbase that was emotionally wrecked by OMORI's style and presentation. However, it's too bloated, too messy and too toothless to make the landing it desperately wants to make. The video game equivalent of eating raw sugar by the handful.

YOU -- "But what if humanity keeps letting us down?"
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "Nobody said that fulfilling the proletariat's historic role would be easy. It demands great faith with no promise of tangible reward. But that doesn't mean we can simply give up."
STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "I guess you can say we believe it *because* it's impossible. It's our way of saying we refuse to accept that the world has to remain... like this..."

---

A 2 week old fetid corpse hangs from a tree, a ghastly sight; a human life reduced to a macabre piñata for small children to pelt stones at in a twisted idea of entertainment. The children themselves, a hopped-up junkie and a nameless orphan respectively, both the result of a broken system that has unequivocally failed them. The district of Martinaise, pockmarked by the remnants of revolutionary war, abandoned by the world at large, it and its people subject to the pissing contests of petty government officials to see who is lumped with the task of looking after the place, the site of a months-long, on-the-brink-of-warfare labor dispute that's about to boil over with the lynching of a PMC soldier who was meant to "defuse" the situation. All of this, left to the hands of a suicidal, vice-riddled husk of a cop who can barely get his necktie down from the ceiling fan without potentially going into cardiac arrest. Disco Elysium is an undeniably depressing experience that isn't afraid to cover the messy spectrum of humanity, from insane race-realist phrenologists to meth-addled children to every kind of ghoulish bureaucrat under the sun. The district of Martinaise, as fictional as it is, is a place I've seen before, reflected in the streets, reflected in the people, reflected in the system; an undeniably full-faced look at the horrors faced by those below, and the resulting apathy expressed by those above.

---

SUGGESTION -- Brother, you should put me in front of a firing squad. I have no words for how I failed you.

---

Every aspect of Disco Elysium reflects its overall theme of "failure". Martinaise itself has been failed by the institutions meant to help it, abandoned by the powers that be, who only intervene when it looks like anyone is trying to enact change. NPCs can reminisce on days gone by, of the tragedies in their past, or of their cynical rebuke of the future. The various schools of political thought you can adopt and their representatives are mercilessly picked apart, from the Communists too entrenched in theory to take notice of the suffering around them, to the frankly pathetic fascists who use their prejudiced beliefs to shield themselves from their own flaws. Our protagonist is constantly haunted by his past and even starts the game recovering from his own self-destructive ways, and on a gameplay level, the way that our intrepid detective can fumble the bag in nearly every way imaginable and still be allowed to make progress in investigations and sidequests is commendable. Failure is so integral, so vital to Disco Elysium that it's not only an aspect deeply ingrained in its story, but also its very gameplay.

---

VOLITION [Easy: Success] -- No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive.

---

And yet, despite this cloying cynicism and acknowledgement of the ugliness of reality, Disco Elysium is magical because of the fact that it ultimately believes that there is a world worth fighting for in the end. It would be incredibly easy to be defeatist in the face of such constant, institutional and societal failure we are presented with in Revachol, to be ceaselessly apathetic in the face of your own overwhelming shortcomings, to fall back into the comfort of old vices instead of facing our problems head on. Still, Disco Elysium has that fire inside of it, an untapped hatred for fence-sitting, for passivity in the face of oppression and valuing the status quo over any meaningful change. Roll up your sleeves and fight for a better future.

---

RHETORIC -- "You've built it before, they've built it before. Hasn't really worked out yet, but neither has love -- should we just stop building love, too?"

---

STEBAN, THE STUDENT COMMUNIST -- "In dark times, should the stars also go out?"

---

RHETORIC -- "Say one of these fascist or communist things or fuck off."

---

Disco Elysium believes in the people. It believes in humanity, no matter how messy our supposed paragons are, or how flawed our beliefs and values can be, or how cyclical we can be in the face of it all. In a city plagued by an inability to move on, Disco Elysium says that there is always a possibility of change. If two broke Communists and a junkie wino can defy the very laws of physics in a slummy apartment, no matter how briefly, with the power of their faith and co-operation; imagine what we could do as a group. As a city. As a species.

Disco Elysium says that the cup is half full. Even if we won't see the own fruits of our labor in our lifetimes, it still looks you in the eyes and says:

"The only promise it offers is that the future can be better than the past, if we're willing to work and fight and die for it," a conviction belted out by the youths of tomorrow.

"Un jour je serai de retour près de toi", written in bright burning letters across a market square.

"TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE/ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD--FOR NEW PEOPLE/IT IS TOO LATE FOR US," painted on the side of an eight-story tenement.

"Disco Inferno...," a lone voice belted out through a boombox's speakers across a frost-bitten sea.

---

MANKIND, BE VIGILANT; WE LOVED YOU

Recommended by Lead as part of this list.

Gaming, like any other artistic medium, has its fair share of touchstone titles, its genre-defining Rosetta Stones that future games in the medium would pull their inspiration and influence from. While there's the obvious ones like Super Mario 64 for the 3D Platformer, or Devil May Cry for the Character Action Game, there's a good chance that if you've played any sci-fi horror game in the past 20 years, you can probably thank System Shock 2 for it's existence in some way. From the immersive sci-fi body horror of Dead Space, to the antagonistic GLaDOS from Portal, to the... Everything of Bioshock, there's a veritable web of connective threads and inspiration that can be weaved from near everything that this initial commercial flop of an immersive sim was pushing back in '99, and having finally played this game hot ("lukewarm" at best) off the heels of a Dead Space playthrough is a piece of serendipity that really helped put System Shock 2's massive influence into perspective as I journeyed through the halls of the Von Braun.

In a word, System Shock 2 is "tense." The Von Braun is this utterly immense location that's filled to the brim with murderous body horror alien beasts and not much else, where everything is an eternal postmortem that's told through the environment and the audio logs you find scattered amongst corpses. The dynamic stereo sound of The Many's minions growing in volume in your left earbud is the only warning you're going to get before a Hybrid with a shotgun runs down the hall to blast your face clean off, and never once over my entire playthrough did it fail to make me clam up with paranoia. The RPG elements and the relative stinginess of experience points mean that every point spent on a stat feels like a tradeoff of some kind, and you always feel lacking in some area even in the end-game (that damn hacking mini-game was going to be the end of me!) Even when I was armed to the teeth with a small armory in my back pocket; and the existence of a currency system alongside generous item vendors around every corner, System Shock 2 still makes you feel like every item counts when your gun jams during a vital encounter, or when you only ever find maybe 6 handgun bullets at a time on every 3rd corpse you stumble upon and scoring a single Medical Hypo is like hitting the jackpot.

While the pseudo-survival horror elements at play give System Shock 2 a lot of tension, it's also nicely counterbalanced by its presentation. Much like Dead Space would imitate years later, a lot of System Shock 2's gameplay elements are made to be diegetic, with level up stations being actual technology in the year 2114, alongside things like the currency being nanomachines that create the items you buy, or your first-person UI being a part of the cybernetic enhancements you've been augmented with. The cold, sleek sci-fi look of everything and the sharp, low-poly corners of the Von Braun make the ship feel unwelcoming and isolating in that sort of uncanny way, and getting jumpscared by 90s Breakcore while I was wandering the halls of MedSci and bashing a Hybrid over the head with a wrench was definitely a trip to say the least. Much has been said about gaming's premier cyber-MILF SHODAN, but it can't be understated how much charm the shaky, antagonistic dynamic between her and the player really adds to the experience. Having the main villain of the first game fall from grace and get betrayed by her own creations in a case of dramatic irony and getting forced into teeth-clenched teamwork with the human protagonist is an honestly genius maneuver, and the inherent humor of completing a mission only to get called a "pathetic insect" by the sentient Speak-N-Spell with a dominatrix streak never got old, and it's part in parcel of what gives System Shock 2 its unique, somewhat pulp-y identity that still stands out today.

Considering that much like our main character, I'm way late to the party in terms of playing System Shock 2 so many years after its ground-breaking release, I'm not really saying anything you haven't heard before, and that's always that case when you go through a game that frequently populates many "Greatest of All Time" lists. What I can at least say is that it is indeed, Pretty Good, and even if that's not exactly a ground-breaking revelation, I firmly believe that there's always value in rounding out your gaming experience with these sort of hallmark cultural touchstones. Happy holidays everyone!

In 2006, the first Silent Hill game was adapted into a feature film by French filmmaker Christopher Gans, and while it was an overall critical failure plagued by many of the same shortcomings that are seemingly inherent to the video game movie genre as a whole, what I found interesting was how many of the elements of the film seemed to foreshadow the eventual future of the franchise. The way the film utilized its source material was full of a passion for the series' style & sound, but failed to utilize any of the iconic iconography that it paraded around with any real substance; a frankly nonsensical and masturbatory worship of recognizable figures like Pyramid Head for audiences to point to and go "That's the thing from the one I like!", and a focus on the series' legacy instead of its influences that would lead to the cyclical repetition of the series' Greatest Hits without any thoughts for the future, and there is no better representation of this phenomena than Silent Hill: Homecoming.

Silent Hill: Homecoming is Silent Hill gone direct to video, a foreign pastiche akin to Spike Lee's "Oldboy" that's less 'psychological horror' and more 'creature feature', a story less interested in isolation and character studies and more in wisecracking black guys who go "Ah hell naaaah!" & "Shieeeeet!". It's a game more interested in letting our boot boy protagonist utilize his 'epic' military training to dodge roll & combo hordes of generic monsters rather than indulging in any feelings of powerlessness or vulnerability. It's a game that's afraid of ambiguity and subtlety, where the all-American hero has to cock his shotgun menacingly at monsters and walk into the sunset with his generic blonde love interest, where the abstract is downplayed for the concrete, so the main plot has to be about specific human error instead of any institutional trauma or individual failings. A game that can't bear to leave you alone, so humans are always a hair's breath away, whether it be the NPCs you're always encountering for cutscenes with dialogue wheel options to choose from, or the generic human cult members you face during the climax.

A story about a war veteran coming to Silent Hill was ripe with potential for symbolism and interesting stories to tell, and Homecoming does have its moments where its presentation almost reaches the heights of its predecessors, but in Homecoming's attempts to improve upon its foundations, it reveals it's true form: a vapid and misguided entry that doesn't have a single original idea in its bones. Unlike Team Silent's wide array of influences, stretching from Dostoevsky's "Crime & Punishment" to the art of Heironymous Bosch, Homecoming's only frame of reference is Silent Hill itself, a capitalistic ouroboros of concepts and ideas regurgitated wholesale to sell recognizability. Much of this game's imagery and backstory is lifted from the film, in a way that makes the whole experience feel like a game based on the film's mythos more than anything Team Silent established. Monsters like the Bubble Head Nurses and Pyramid Head are dolled up and wheeled out for the equivalent of a money shot, and even the plot itself is a simple retread of Silent Hill 2's in a misguided attempt to re-sell success, telling a story about grief & loss that's delivered in the language of a B-horror flick that's about as subtle as a brick to the dome.

But Homecoming's biggest failing is that even without the historic legacy of the Silent Hill brand dragging it down, it's just a fucking boring game. It's an utterly generic, buggy and tedious survival horror experience that's trapped in a Catch-22: A game that would never be published without the name of Silent Hill attached, but one who's greatest failings are due to being saddled with the legacy Silent Hill entails. A game trapped in a hell of its own creation made of Pyramid Head figurines and Bubble Head Nurse pin-up posters.

This isn't the kind of thing I typically use my reviews for (and I don't plan to make a habit out of it), but about a little over a year ago, I released a Yume Nikki fangame called Separation Anxiety for Dream Diary Jam 5. With the help & company of fellow Backloggd user ludzu, we've recorded a developer's commentary for the game. If you ever wanted to hear someone ramble about niche RPG Maker games, game development, and Silent Hill, I hope you enjoy.

https://youtu.be/eJwd2Ss6ERk

The long drag of a cigarette beneath the city's smog, the urban firmament of glitzy neon signs illuminating a starless sky. Passersby are flagged down by salesmen trying to drag the drunk and the impressionable into hostess clubs, thugs crowd around shady alleyways and dingy dives, an evil eye aimed at any fool too brazen to wander too close. The city is an ecosystem all its own, a interconnected web of the unscrupulous and the downtrodden ensuring an uneasy system of checks and balances. Stand still and you will surely hear its heart beat.

The crowd gathers, and for a brief moment, the underworld deigns to show its belly to the world above. The sound of flesh meeting pavement, of skulls fracturing and limbs breaking, of glass shattering, bullets firing, the wails of a guitar, dirty and unrefined, as overconfident goons and gangsters punch above their weight class attempting to face the dragon as he tosses them aside like litter.

Yakuza is a filthy game, rough and weathered, a stark contrast to the polish of its successors in both sight and sound. It's a raw, intensely atmospheric game full of grungy guitars and rough characters, a game that seems to truly capture the feel of the streets: Quick. Dirty. Brutal, above all else. Without the bombast of microwaving someone's skull or over-the-top action movie antics, we're left with bottles stabbed into eyes, knives jabbed into guts, curb-stomps upon skulls and the desperate wailing of fists, a much more grounded attempt to capture the swift brutality of dirty street brawls.

Yakuza is a tale of blood money, of corruption, ruthlessness and the lingua franca of the fist. A story about the dangers of ambition, the follies of old men and their pride, the glitz and glamor of the criminal underworld, and the fate such a life seals for those who partake in it. The city of Kamurocho is a city that operates on the most primal of rules: Survival of the fittest. It's a city who's history is written in the blood of ruthless and told by those left standing at the end of it all. It's a hotspot for the hedonistic, and the eventual grave of those who've intertwined their fates with the enticing allure of the criminal lifestyle. It's a city with a bloodied history of urban warfare and shady backdoor politics it's waiting to tell.

Will you listen?

Recommended by KB0 as part of this list.

"Libera temet ex inferis."

The USG Ishimura lies abandoned, harnessed in the orbit of Aegis VII, a metal coffin that holds within the full spectrum of life itself: The dead, the soon to be, and the reborn. The rhythmic thud of our hero Isaac's boots fill the vacant air of corpse-strewn halls, the far-off screams of either a victim or a perpetrator ringing just out of earshot. The ear-splitting thump-thump of the heart, the sounds of labored & panicked breathing on the precipice of hyperventilation, the subtle click of Isaac's repurposed-for-war power tool being raised and aimed at an elevator door that seems to descend into eternity.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

The presentation of Dead Space is easily it's biggest strength. It's insistence at making every mechanic and video game genre convention a diegetic part of the world lends it an atmosphere like no other. Nearly every weapon that Isaac gains is a power tool instead of a designated instrument of war. The menus are hologram projections that we can see the back off when the camera is rotated around with the right stick. The health bar is a physical part of Isaac's suit. Posters around the USG Ishimura mention gameplay mechanics like the Stasis or Kinesis Modules. All these little details culminate in one of the most immersive horror games I've played in recent memory, despite it's futuristic setting and high-concept.

Alongside it's phenomenal UI, the suspense of its exploration is another aspect in which Dead Space shines. The somewhat cramped over-the-shoulder camera closing in on Isaac in cramped corridors. The near-silence of the vacuum of space, where enemies are silent and the only feedback you have is the subtle vibration of your controller as Isaac walks and shoots. The minimal cast of human characters which Isaac very rarely (if ever) directly interacts with or sees in any capacity, exacerbated by Isaac's silence in the face of it all. The entirety of Isaac's nightmarish affair trapped in the great starry abyss is permeated by an intensely isolating feeling that had me aiming my trusty Plasma Cutter at every doorway, tensed up at what could potentially be behind the turn of a hallway. It's a masterclass in horror suspense that had me on the edge of my seat dreading most encounters.

While Dead Space's idea of horror is incredibly cheesy, never really advancing beyond its initial arsenal of spooky monsters going "OOGA-BOOGA!" at you while the orchestral score puts it's whole pussy into the horn section, it's in it's encounter design that Dead Space makes the most of its survival horror aspirations. The Necromorphs unique weakness is their limbs, requiring a different skillset than the average third-person shooter since it's all about dismemberment; careful aiming and precise shots at constantly moving targets that love to ambush you from vents both above and below in these incredibly tight spaces, forcing you up close and personal as you try to line up shots with your limited ammo and somewhat clumsy unarmed moveset (aside from the best stomp in the industry bar none). Every encounter is tense, with item drops being somewhat stingy and usually only enough to barely get you by in a pinch, and it's truly sublime. In my first time playthrough where I never used anything aside from the starting Plasma Cutter, there was a section in Chapter 9 where I was neck-deep in the thick of it, with no shops nearby and only 14 shots left to my name. I was just barely scrapping by each encounter, taking care not to let even a single shot run errant, thanking the lord for every measly pickup of 6 bullets I found in a corner somewhere, and even making mad dashes across an arena looking for anything to use when I ran out of ammo, Necromorphs nipping at my heels all the while. It's the most fun I've had in an action game in a long while and it's the sort of thrill I can't get enough of.

Nearing almost 14 years since its initial release, Dead Space still stands tall above its contemporaries as a standout survival horror title, and no doubt one of the best from the 7th generation alone. It's oppressive atmosphere, love for its sci-fi contemporaries and no-frills tense gameplay make it a must play for both survival horror enthusiasts and action game junkies.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

...

"Hazardous Anomaly Detected. Quarantine Activated."

Recommended by Ardwyw_mp3 as part of this list.

The world of untranslated niche Japanese gaming is one that's always interesting to delve into as an outsider looking in. While even the most niche titles are often translated for us here in the Anglosphere nowadays, there's still a treasure trove of untranslated oddities from decades prior waiting to be discovered by aesthetic gimmick accounts, and while Docchi Mecha! looks like it'd be right up the alley of that kind of audience, its managed to slip through the cracks of time and info on the game is hard to come by, even on the Japanese side of the net. So here we have a real hidden gem, a game that required me to roll up my sleeves and get to the bottom of myself.

So what is Docchi Mecha!, exactly? It's a console RTS about a colorful cast of characters competing in a tournament to become a God of some sort and gain control of their own planet (at least, this is what I could gleam from the Google Translated Wikipedia synopsis and the story-mode cutscenes). Despite the somewhat serious-sounding premise though, Docchi Mecha! is an incredibly goofy game. Everyone, from the troops to the opponents are very silly-looking and full of charm, with your opponents ranging from super sentai fanboys to some kid's overly-doting mother, and the troops themselves are these abstract, Ballz-3D amalgamations of fuzzy-looking sprites and googly eyes. It has a very childish vibe, with its simple designs, youthful voice acting, and colorful palette & UI, which helps to disarm you when it kicks your teeth in with its frantic gameplay.

Now, "Console RTS" is the kind of phrase that inspires fear in the hearts of many a PC-playing fiend, but Docchi Mecha knows its limitations and keeps it simple, simple enough for both its young target audience and functionally-illiterate English-only bozos like myself to understand. The goal of each match is cultivate an army of dubious little critters in order to capture checkpoints as you trek across the map and ultimately destroy the opponent's base camp. Each troop has its own unique function, from the disposable foot soldiers who build camps and harvest resources, to the elite squadron of top-heavy goons who serve as your main source of damage. It's a game of momentum, where both you and the opponent start off with nothing and slowly gain resources and troops until the match either turns into a drawn-out war of attrition or the most embarrassing curb-stomp ever seen in the history of warfare. Docchi Mecha! takes no prisoners, because it gets difficult real fast if you aren't on your P's and Q's. The second opponent you face pushed my shit in hard and each subsequent match just keeps escalating in difficulty until I was gorilla-gripping my controller mashing hotkeys and hoping my adorable army of funny little dudes don't get utterly stomped by the giant flatfish my opponent just spawned. It's frantic and panic-inducing RTS gameplay that works surprisingly well for a console game and it's honestly incredibly fun, even for someone like me who isn't a big RTS buff all things considered.

In this golden age of fantranslations, it's a little sad that stuff like Docchi Mecha! falls by the wayside, because it's an interesting curio that deserves at least some attention, due to its easy-to-pick-up nature and overall wacky charm, and it's worth a glance at the very least, even if you can't speak a lick of Japanese.

Recommended by Squigglydot as part of this list.

Of all the things to turn into a multi-media franchise, Black Rock Shooter has to be one of the more bizarre things to do so. All the way back in 2007, Pixiv user 'Huke' posted a sketch of a girl simply titled "Black Rock Shooter". This would eventually lead to a collaboration between Vocaloid band Supercell and Huke to create a song and music video named after the eponymous sketch, "Black Rock Shooter". The resulting unprecedented success of the music video lead to the creation of a multimedia franchise that, while nowadays, is a relatively obscure property with a mostly dormant fanbase, once ruled as a mainstay of late 2000s-early 2010s weeaboo culture referenced by video games and anime alike, with an OVA, an anime series, and the topic of today's writing, a PSP action-RPG released all the way back in 2011.

Black Rock Shooter: The Game is a third-person rail-shooter/action RPG hybrid about our eponymous Black Rock Shooter fighting an alien menace to save the last remnants of humanity from extinction, and as interesting as that sounds, it's unfortunately dragged down by its own ambition. The story has its moments, being a pretty somber affair that can get get surprisingly dark at times (the whole "saving humanity" thing goes tits-up by the halfway point and things don't really get better for our hero afterwards), but there's a lot of drawn out cutscenes full of fluff and nonsensical expository dialogue that fails to explain anything of worth. The gameplay is novel but it shows all its cards from Hour 1 and never really evolves in terms of strategy or intrigue. The mission based structure and numerous optional challenges suit the handheld ecosystem but often lead to busywork that makes the game feel incredibly padded despite its relatively short length. It's very "one step forward, two steps back" in execution, but in all honesty, the game itself is the least interesting part about Black Rock Shooter: The Game, when its very existence is a much more intriguing topic.

There's something to be said about the intersection of internet media and the mainstream in this specific cultural era, when the internet was still a relatively untested medium for entertainment and anything that saw a modicum of success online would often be poached by bigwigs in an attempt to turn that viral success into real-world profit. It's this line of thinking that could put flash hits like Alien Hominid and Super Meat Boy on official storefronts, or on the other side of the coin, lead to endeavors like "Fred: The Movie" or "The High Fructose Adventures of Annoying Orange", efforts to capitalize on internet stardom before their Fifteen Minutes of Fame expired. In an era before itch.io, modern YouTube, and video streaming, where avenues for smaller creators to publish their work were much more limited, going "official" was simply seen as the only option for any IP, a relic of thinking from before the internet was such an integral part of our lives.

But despite the cynicism I've presented thus far, Black Rock Shooter: The Game has a surprising amount of money and talent thrown at it for being a late PSP budget title, including the writer for Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts II, the director behind Persona 3 & Valkyria Chronicles, and high-budget voice talent like Miyuki Sawashiro. Hell, the very fact it got an official western release (despite being limited to only America and Europe) is nothing short of a miracle. This production information, contrasted with the game's middling reception, makes coming back to Black Rock Shooter: The Game over a decade later feel like discovering the ruins of Ozymandias' works, a once mighty glimpse at a media powerhouse, the ashes of a firework, its luster a mere memory to those around to witness it. But if anything, it serves as a reminder of simpler times, the era of rags-to-riches stories born of the most unlikely of circumstances, the kind of meteoric stardom you see less and less of nowadays as independent publishing venues and thousands of talented artists competing for attention online render the multi-media fame of any other potential Black Rock Shooters more and more of a fantasy as the years go by.

Godspeed you, Black Rock Shooter.

Recommended by Texhs as part of this list.

The Cat Lady is an immediately striking game, it's monochromatic & semi-photorealistic aesthetic accompanied by an opening act that can only be described as uncomfortably candid and merciless in execution. For it's first 15 minutes or so, The Cat Lady calls to mind it's psychological horror contemporaries, however, it's the immediate swerve the premise of The Cat Lady takes after it's strong opening that lifts The Cat Lady out of its psychological horror niche and truly gives it character by placing it squarely in the realm of the exploitation film, a Silent Hill game by way of I Spit on Your Grave, a horror adventure not only about coming to grips with your trauma, but also about catharsis, of delivering justice to those who have wronged you and others like you.

What I found the most striking about The Cat Lady was its distinctly feminine attitude. Often does cheap horror use violence against women as a standard shock tactic, the standard positioning of women as a stand-in for innocence and the brutalization of their form/psyche as the ultimate "horror", quote-unquote, but rarely are distinctly feminine worries and perspectives used as a basis for tactful horror (in gaming, at the very least.) In the same way Silent Hill 3 strikes that chord of uniquely feminine fears with its focus on birth (God), the body (blood, puberty, the denial of autonomy by patriarchal organizations a la religion/The Order) and urban life (being approached by strange men in public, walking home alone at night), The Cat Lady focuses on similar topics and themes, the lead character Susan Ashworth made an immortal angel of death who enacts vengeance on so-called "Parasites", for the majority of which are men who hurt vulnerable women. These include doctors who exploit their seniority over female co-workers to enact violent and sexual fantasies upon them, repairmen who kidnap women while they're alone, and stalkers who feel sexually entitled to a woman because they tried to buy their hearts with material goods and get violent when denied.

But even outside the obvious violence, there's the more abstract forms of violence dealt to Susan: her past involving dealing with newfound motherhood alongside her misogynistic, immature husband who often made her feel like a lesser; Susan's present as a loner who's one source of joy is often criticized and threatened by the society she resides in, the entire hospital chapter that revolves around Susan and her requests/questions being denied by hospital staff despite her insistence, it's all so very purposeful in its implementation and execution. To loop back around to the I Spit on Your Grave comparison, it can feel exploitative, the way Susan and others are often victims of excessive violence to move the plot along, but the way Susan status as the player character lends our sympathies to her and gives her character and meaning, the way each parasite she takes out is firmly established as a villain and never given any sympathy or justification for their actions, it's all done to ensure catharsis, to criticize, to enact a vengeance that often goes undelivered in the real world. It makes The Cat Lady stand out among its horror contemporaries for it's shockingly mature sensibilities, despite the schlocky one-liners and cheesy soundtrack that are plenty abound.

While The Cat Lady can be quite heavy-handed in its messaging and tone (the entirety of Chapter 3 being a "DON'T HAVE A BREAKDOWN" mental health puzzle is borderline comical), it has a lot of material that resonates to this day. It's treatment of mental illness (accidentally using spoiled milk in my coffee and suffering a mental breakdown aside) is sympathetic and quite accurate to reality, and the main villain of the game's latter half being a targeted observation and take down of imageboard culture, the blackpill philosophy and the way it exploits the vulnerable into radical real-life action is something that I both was not expecting to see in a 2012 game and also still ring true a decade later. It's these touches, this sympathy and focus on catharsis and finding meaning despite tragedy that makes The Cat Lady such a thoroughly engaging experience and a genuine horror standout even a decade later.

"On the first day

man was granted a soul

And with it, clarity"

There's something oddly quaint about Demon's Souls, with its soundtrack's goofy orchestral bombast, relatively bog-standard dark fantasy setting and minimalist tale of kings & demons, conjuring up imagery of a DM's first DnD campaign, no doubt the result of a cultural import of Wizardy shaping the early days of Japan's RPG scene in ways that would give birth to Demon's Souls' very predecessor, King's Field. This basic tale of fallen kingdoms and terrifying demons, crestfallen knights and ancient dragons capturing the hearts of thousands as an old-school throwback trailblazer of the action RPG genre when it dropped in 2009, yet now mostly looked upon as an ancient ancestor defined almost entirely by its progeny's legacy.

"On the second day

upon Earth was planted an irrevocable poison

A soul-devouring demon"

It's this aforementioned quaintness though, that gives Demon's Souls the leg up in comparison to its spiritual successors in the multi-million Soulsbornekiroring franchise. The artificiality of Boletaria, it's segregation into video-gamey worlds aided immensely by its strong atmosphere, of abandoned monoliths and overrun capitals, of howling prisoners and majestic beasts that ebb & flow on the horizon, a setting so seemingly uninspired on paper yet so deeply compelling in motion. A game of antiquity, of four-direction dodge rolls and jank-ass lock-on, like pulling puppets missing a few strings; of spite, that thrives upon kicking you while you are down and robbing you of progress much more than its future installments ever would, yet it's so utterly cognizant of its shortcomings that it creates some of the most interesting boss encounters of the series so far, goliaths that do not simply ask for skillful execution and high-level action gameplay, but for observation, for spatial awareness, for a level of comprehension beyond spamming R1 at someone's ankles. Bosses such as Old Hero, Dragon God and Fool's Idol engage me on a level that not a single boss from Elden Ring managed to do so, and its a lost magic I wish other games of Demon's Souls' kin would try to recapture.

Demon's Souls is a game that left me with genuine headaches and gritted teeth at its obtuse brutality, and yet it is still filled to the brim with the magnetic charm of early FromSoft that compels me to their portfolio, the so very human feeling of perseverance in the face of adversity that runs through much of their catalogue. It's a game that I did not enjoy for most of my playtime, but it's one that deserves its praises and more, even if I'm not the kind of die-hard enthusiast these games seem to compel.

"Soul of the mind, key to life's ether

Soul of the lost, withdrawn from its vessel.

Let strength be granted so the world might be mended.

So the world might be mended."

Recommended by Nightblade as part of this list.

Wario is an odd character isn't he? Mario's opposite in every way, a bootleg completely defined by his contrast to his sanitized, family-friendly multi-million dollar counterpart. Mario is a chaste man of virtue, a hero of few words who saves the girl out of the goodness of his heart, a marketable face a la Mickey Mouse, utterly lacking in personality or character outside of being comically Italian. Wario in contrast is a portly type, a Kavorka Man defined by his vices, an ugly, greedy bastard who loves to gloat, with a face only a mother could love. And yet it is because Wario is entirely defined by being the antithesis of Mr. Jumpman that he has the one thing Mario could never dream of: freedom. Mario is confined by the brand, the 40 years of jumping and sleek design ethos iterated upon for decades over multiple console generations until the formula is down pat, the Super Mario Brand of platforming action. Wario's status as the opposite also extends to his games and their design, his freedom to experiment and spread his wings so to speak allow Wario to do whatever he damn well pleases, which is why even now, Wario Land 4 stands tall as Wario's "greatest achievement".

Wario Land 4 came hot off the heels of the last big Mario romp at the time, Super Mario 64, and in many ways, feels like a parody of sorts. Wario's latest treasure hunt has lead to him being trapped in a pyramid, where he must jump into paintings to gather a series of collectibles and save the princess utilizing his robust and dynamic moveset to do so. While the comparisons to be drawn are obvious, Wario Land 4's design philosophy veers in a different direction, being a much more linear experience focused more on Wario and his interactions with the environment than the exploration of the environments themselves. The functional immortality of previous Wario Land games is toned-down but still ever-present, with certain enemy types changing Wario's movement properties in ways that create a unique dynamic of enemies being both a puzzle-solving tool and an obstacle, that alongside each level introducing a new gimmick and gameplay mechanic to experiment contributes to some incredibly strong level design that makes each stage feel unique and distinct.

The exploration aspect of Wario Land 4 is contrasted by it's HURRY UP! mechanic, each level capped off by a switch that activates a countdown timer that will kick you out of the level and rob Wario of his riches if it reaches zero, transforming the previously, seemingly labyrinthine levels that you spent oodles of time exploring into these one-way obstacle courses that demand perfect execution on higher difficulties if you want a chance to make it to the end with your treasure in-tact. It's a genius mechanic that makes Wario Land 4 stand out and adds another layer to the level design in ways you wouldn't expect, complimented by Wario's fantastic and dynamic moveset that makes these mad dashes some of the most satisfying platforming action on the GBA.

But the biggest aspect of Wario Land 4 that makes it stand out from it's doppelganger's series of games is that aesthetically, it's fucking weird. Compared to the cartoonish surreality of the Mario series, with its anthropomorphic turtles and scenery dotted with eyes, Wario Land 4 is reminiscent of the gross-out humor of the 90s, containing surreal, disgusting, sometimes horrific spritework and enemy designs, alongside an incredibly dynamic and off-kilter soundtrack that gives the whole game an certain edge most Nintendo products would never even deign to hint at. Many of the staff that worked on Wario Land 4 would go on to work on WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Micro Game$! 2 years after Wario Land 4's release, and its immediately apparent in Wario Land 4's overall attitude. Yet, it's this edge and experimentation that makes Wario so charismatic a player character, so charming a man that he captures your heart through his sincerity and in-your-face attitude.

Considering that state of Nintendo at the moment, its no wonder that this kind of off-kilter platforming action has yet to resurface in its modern oeuvre, considering the sleek minimalist nature of the Switch and the stark white of the UI in Nintendo's triple-A titles. The wacky, innovative spirit may live on in the WarioWare franchise, but any hopes of Wario's puzzle-platforming antics resurfacing at the Big N's HQ are minimal at best, which is a shame because Wario Land's vibes are infinitely more magnetic than whatever sterile mask Mario is putting on for the public. Du Doppelgänger! Du bleicher Geselle! How you shall be missed...